It was the mysterious place at the center of Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything Is Illuminated—not a shtetl at the fringes of some other town in the Ukraine but a freestanding, fully realized Jewish city that vanished during World War II. Avrom Bendavid-Val's father grew up in Trochenbrod and regaled his son with tales of his childhood there. In Bendavid-Val's haunting portrait of a lost world, Trochenbrod grows from a tiny row of houses built on empty marshland in the middle of the Radziwill Forest to its emergence as a bustling marketplace where people from all over Ukraine and Poland came to do business. Though obliterated by the Nazis in 1942, Trochenbrod lives on as a legendary homeland in the minds of its scattered descendants. "If this book feels more fantastical than my novel, or than any novel you've ever read," says Foer in his preface, "it is because of Trochenbrod's ingenuity, the Holocaust's ferocity, and Bendavid-Val's heroic research and pitch-perfect storytelling."

"Intertwining his own research with the meticulously documented, gripping personal histories of Trochenbrod's survivors, Bendavid-Val crafts a well-researched, detailed, and eminently readable work. This is an essential read ... as Bendavid-Val shares not only the culture and customs of Slavic Jews before the 1930s but also the long-lasting and deeply felt impact of the Holocaust on the survivors."—Library Journal (starred review)